Mr. James’s Reviews > Suttree > Status Update

He fell to studying the variety of moths pressed to the glass, resting his elbows on the sill and his chin on the back of his hand. Supplicants of light. Here one tinted easter pink along the edges of his white fur belly and wings. Eyes black, triangular, a robber's mask. Furred and wizened face not unlike a monkey's and wearing a windswept ermine shako. Suttree bent to see him better. What do you want? -- C.M.

I'd like these shoes soled I dreamt I dreamt. An old bent cobbler looked up from his lasts and lapstone with eyes dim and windowed. Not these, my boy, they are far too far gone, these soles. But I've no others. The old man shook his head. You must forget these and find others now. -- C.M.

Suttree looked at him. He was not lovable. This adenoidal leptosome that crouched above his bed like a wizened bird, his razorous shoulderblades, jutting in the thin cloth of his striped shirt. Sly, ratfaced, a convicted pervert of a botanical bent. Who would do worse when in the world again. Bet on it. But something in him so transparent, something vulnerable. -- C.M.

In the long days of fall they went like dreamers. Watching the sky for rain. When it came it rained for days. [...] A sad and bitter season. Barrenness of heart and gothic loneliness. Suttree dreamed old dreams of fairgrounds where young girls with flowered hair and wide child's eyes watched by flarelight sequined aerialists aloft. Visions of unspeakable loveliness from a world lost. -- C.M.

Somebody has been fuckin my watermelons. [...] What do you aim to do? Hell, I don't know. It's about too late to do anything. He's damn near screwed the whole patch. I don't see why he couldnt of stuck to just one. Or a few. Well, I guess he takes himself for a lover. Sort of like a sailor in a whorehouse. -- C.M.

The last time I drank some of that shit I like to died. I stunk from the inside out. I laid in a tub of hot water all day and climbed out and dried and you could still smell it. I had to burn my clothes. I had the dry heaves, the drizzling shits, the cold shakes and the jakeleg. I can think about it now and feel bad. -- C.M.

From all old seamy throats of elders, musty books, I've salvaged not a word. In a dream I walked with my grandfather by a dark lake and the old man's talk was filled with incertitude. I saw how all things false fall from the dead. -- C.M.

The shadowed earth in which he squatted bore the stale order of a crypt. -- C.M.

They stood looking at the dead man. The squad workers were coiling their ropes and seeing to their tackle. [...] He lay there in his yellow socks with the flies crawling on the blanket and one hand stretched out on the grass. He wore his watch on the inside of his wrist as some folks do or used to and as Suttree passed he noticed with a feeling he could not name that the dead man's watch was still running. -- C.M.

Down there in grots of fallen light a cat transpires from stone to stone across the cobbles liquid black and sewn in rapid antipodes over the rain dark street to vanish cat and countercat in the rifted works beyond. -- C.M.